Your Daughter Died

Your daughter died.

Your daughter died thousands of miles from home. In a hotel where no one came to help. In a hospital where she struggled to keep breathing and just couldn’t. In a room where her heart — and somehow you still don’t really believe this — just stuttered to a stop. In a country, where authorities have failed for months, years even, to tell you how or why your daughter died.

Your daughter died on an island in Thailand, famed for its stardust beaches and its parties that glitter through the night. She died in an old and lovely mountain town, in the northern reaches of that country, just a few days after she wrote to tell you how very much she loved it there. Of course, you worried; what parent doesn’t when a child travels so far from home? But you thought she was safe or you would never have opened your hands as you did, let her go.

Jill St. Onge

Your daughter, you’ve come to realize, died in a pattern that links too many other young women, a chain of suspected poisonings over the last few years. It starts with Jill St. Onge, 27, of Seattle, Washington, and Julie Bergheim, 22, of Drammen, Norway, who both died in May 2009 on the southern island of Koh Phi Phi. It continues with Sherifa Khalid, 24, of Kuwait, who died 12 hours after she spent a day on the same island in July of the same year. And it still continues.

Not that this has ever been investigated with any apparent enthusiasm by the Thai authorities. In 2011, two years after Jill’s death, the U.S. Embassy in Thailand sent her parents a letter best characterized by its hang-wringing frustration:

“We have attempted on multiple occasions to find out what happened to all the items taken for testing…” it reads, noting that many of the test samples were not taken until five weeks after the deaths and that the police had made no effort to seal the women’s hotel rooms in the interim. The embassy had been unable to learn of any useful results that would explain the deaths on Koh Phi Phi. “I imagine your frustration with this is much greater than ours and that our sympathy is of little comfort.”

Your daughter, Soraya Vorster Pandola, 33, of Berkeley, California, died in January of 2011, the same year the embassy was expressing its frustration over another death. She died to the north, in the city of Chiang Mai, where she’d been working as a bicycle tour guide. “In her last communication with us, a few days before we learned she’d been hospitalized, our daughter communicated to us how much she loved Thailand and the friendships she had cultivated during a series of visits there,” her father, Ted Vorster, wrote to me after I wrote two posts about what struck me — like so many others — as too many deaths with too little credible explanation.

You rushed to Thailand, hoping to save your child. But your daughter died just hours after your arrival. The Vorsters were told that Soraya appeared to be suffering from exposure to some toxic chemical compound, possibly a pesticide. Yet, a few weeks later when others in the same city started to die with similar symptoms — acute nausea, difficulty breathing, inflammation of the heart muscle — her father recalls the “reaction of the authorities in Chiang Mai was to downplay the significance, despite the almost identical symptoms and rapid progress of the illness to what my daughter experienced.”

Soraya Vorster Pandola

There was a tumbling block cascade of the dead that followed Soraya, mostly people staying at a hotel called the Downtown Inn. First a Canadian, Bill Mah, 59 on Jan. 26; followed by the death of a Thai tour guide, Warapom Pungmahisiranom, 47 on Feb. 3; New Zealander Sarah Carter, 23, on Feb. 4, and a British couple, Bill, 78, and Eileen Everitt, 74, two weeks later. As the Bangkok Post reported, the building that began to be referred to as “the death hotel” was torn down this spring.

Your daughter died; she was only 23. So it was Sarah Carter’s death that drew the most attention, largely because her parents exploded in a fury of protest. Of course they did. They had nothing to hold on to, no explanation of loss, as they struggled to understand. The governor of Chiang Mai at first dismissed all the deaths as a coincidence. An investigation by a New Zealand television station raised the idea of insecticide poisoning, perhaps the illicit use of the pesticide, chlororpyrifos, to treat bed bugs. But, as I wrote this fall, that particular compound makes imperfect sense because while poisonous, it’s also a neurotoxin not particularly known for causing inflammation of the heart muscle, and heart damage was a consistent symptom in the Chiang Mai deaths.

Sarah Carter

The letter to Jill St. Onge’s parents tells you that U.S. officials doubted that idea from the beginning, mostly because the compound is only considered moderately toxic on the dangerous pesticide scale. “Chlorpyrifos alone seems unlikely because extremely high concentrations would be needed to kill so quickly,” the embassy wrote in the spring of 2011. The Carters, the St. Onge family, the Vorsters, all of them, are still waiting for that believable explanation.

So your daughter died and instead of answers you started hearing the whispers. The rumors, the under-the-table theories. People contacted you, I suspect, as they’ve contacted me. You heard those darker stories of life in this corner of the world. You received notes like this one:

“I used to work in Phuket (a resort island off Thailand’s southern coast) in 5-star hotels and have seen it to be a common practice to poison foreigners. It has never been made public but I do know of the poisoning of an executive chef, a Swiss sales and marketing girl and a general manager who almost died… the police never took any action and neither did the owners and it was kept quiet…” You received messages that echoed your anger and frustration: “something is rotten in Thailand.” Messages that hinted at cover-ups and conspiracies: “Everyone blamed bug poison….but there is something scarier going on.”

You received copies of stories, such as travel journalist Nina-Noelle Hall’s look at the Phi Phi Islands in Thailand’s C-magazine about the resort island of Koh Phi Phi: “When the unlucky vomit to death, find themselves in a murderous altercation, or go missing, the authorities have a suspicious pattern of allowing the case to fade into distant memories, old archives, all “unexplained.” You learned that even the tourism-focused paper, Phuket Wan, has crusaded for more honest investigations of these deaths on the islands.

But still daughters continued to die. This summer, two more dead on Koh Phi Phi, two sisters from a small town in Canada who decided to vacation together and who died together in their hotel room in June. Again, there’s a moving target of explanations from the authorities. The police blame first poisonous mushrooms, then poisonous fish, then a cocktail laced with the mosquito repellent DEET as a cause for the deaths of the Belanger sisters, Noemi, 26 and Audrey, 20. And again, as I wrote earlier, none of these suggestions ever answered your questions.

Audrey and Noemi Belanger

So your daughter died and you may never know why or how. You wonder if you could have somehow saved her but there’s no way to find that out. “I am under no illusion that we will ever get the kind of answers that would lay to rest the constant ‘what-ifs’ my wife and I entertain in thinking about our daughter’s death,” Ted Vorster wrote to me last week. “We cannot change the fact of her death, yet without any clear understanding of what caused it, I feel an acute sense that we are betraying her memory, particularly if it was preventable in some way.”

If you could get some answers, you might able to save someone else’s child. And if you could do that, it might offer you some comfort, some resolution. But instead you are left, trapped, at the point where all of this started.

Your daughter died.

Note: After I wrote the two posts cited above, I talked in late October about the poisoning of young female tourists in Southeast Asia on NPR’s All Things Considered. Many people contacted me afterward with tips, their personal stories, investigations that they’d done into deaths in Thailand. All of them expressed frustration over the limbo-land that these families have been left to wander, which I’ve tried to convey here. But I’d also like to send my thanks to the families of Soraya Vorster and Jill St. Onge for their help with this story, to Denis Green, Nina-Noelle Hall, and to the generosity of everyone who wrote and wanted to help.